


Grandpa Smith

by Syntax



Series: 50k Challenge Oneshots [12]
Category: Ben 10 Series, DragonFable (Video Games)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fusion, Birthday, Crack Crossover, Family Fluff, Gen, Internal Reveal, Time Skips, a brunet with fantastical powers and a love of green, but it's weird that it happened twice right, i'd have two nickels, if i had a nickel for every time i saw, who recreated his universe after it was destroyed by an alien superweapon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-27
Updated: 2020-02-27
Packaged: 2021-02-28 02:29:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,564
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22916275
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Syntax/pseuds/Syntax
Summary: Sandra has parents too, doesn't she?
Series: 50k Challenge Oneshots [12]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1627744
Comments: 2
Kudos: 17





	Grandpa Smith

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Tmae](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tmae/gifts).



> _*blows party horn*_ Happy Birthday Tirzah! Hope you like it!

It starts when Ben is about three years old, running around in his new green raincoat and his new black rain boots, splashing in the puddles that line the street. His momma promised to take him to the park that day, and when she saw the rain falling down from the grey sky she decided that a little bit of moisture wasn't enough reason to break that promise.

"Come on, Ben," she'd said, wrapping his shiny new raincoat around his shoulders so he could stick his little arms through the holes, "There's no such thing as a day too rainy to play, there's just outfits that you shouldn't wear to play in the rain."

"Okay Momma!" he'd chimed, and she'd ruffled his hair with her hand before leading him out of the house and onto the sidewalk.

The walk to the park isn't very long—or at least it shouldn't be. Normally it only takes a few minutes to get from their house to the slides, or their house to the swings, or their house to whatever new installation of imagination-building equipment that caught Ben's attention this week. But today is a rainy day, and rainy days mean puddles in the streets and worms in the grass, both very important things for any young boy wanting to play. He jumps and splashes and scampers through the grass until the hood of his raincoat falls over and the rain starts clumping his hair to his face.

"Be~en!" His momma calls for him, sing-song. Her own raincoat is still properly settled, all lavender and pretty with white polka dots. The allure of a puddle is no match for his momma's will. "We need to get going, silly billy!"

"There's worms in the grass, Momma!" he says. He runs up to her anyways, enjoying the splish-splash of the water under his rain boots. The rain's wetted his hair enough that it falls over his eyes in messy little curls and clumps. He has to wipe it out of the way if he wants to look at her, smiling a happy little smile.

"I know, I know," she says, "But I'm sure there'll be worms at the park too, and you can swing on the sidewalk."

His momma pauses for a bit as she talks, like she just noticed something. A smile blooms on her face.

"Well, look at you, all dressed in green with your hair over your eyes. You look just like your grandfather." She offers him a hand to hold. Ben takes it.

"I look like Grandpa Max?" he says. _How exciting!_ Ben thought. Grandpa Max gives the best hugs.

"No," his mom says, giggling, "Not Grandpa Max. You look like my father. Your _other_ grandpa."

 _How exciting!_ Ben thought. Grandpa Smith gives the best presents.

-

It starts when Ben is about four years old, helping his momma make a scrapbook as a birthday present to her momma. There's a whole bunch of pictures littering the floor mixed in with a bunch of ribbons and stickers and stamps and documents, most of which Ben has never even seen before.

He holds up a picture to his momma and asks, "What's this one?" It's an odd picture, full of people Ben doesn't recognize. They're all gathered around the person in the middle, with big blue hair and ripped black clothes. The people in the picture look happy, whoever they are.

His momma takes the picture from his hands, gently, and looks. "Oh. That's your great-uncle Beaufort, back when he was still dying his hair and playing in a band—Mad Mad Magic. They never really got big beyond a local level, but it was still fun to listen to them play. I think I might have a few cassettes lying around in the garage that you could listen to later if you want." She pointed at the various people in the picture. "The one in black is your great-uncle, and the one next to him in hot pink is Grandma Zelda. The rest are their friends from college; I think the other girl hanging off Uncle Beaufort was his girlfriend back then. Your Grandpa Smith took this photo, you know."

"Whoa," Ben says, and he puts the picture back on the floor with the others. He picks up another at random. This photo has a little girl in an odd outfit, holding some kind of ballerina pose. "And this one?"

"That's from when I used to play dress up as a little girl," his momma says. She looks at the picture fondly. "I'd just started taking ballet lessons, and I wanted to show off. Grandpa Smith thought it was hilarious that I was trying to dance like a ballerina in a suit of armor."

Ben takes another look at the photograph, confused. It... kind of looks like his momma? Maybe? She looks more like the girls he sees at the part than anything else, but he supposes that even grown ups were kids once. An idea suddenly hits him.

"Did Grandpa Smith take a lot of these pictures?" Ben asks, shuffling through the polaroids on the carpet. "I don't see him in any of these."

"Yeah, my dad was a real shutterfly once upon a time. Cameras were totally new to him when we first got ours, so he took pictures of everything. Just keep looking, Ben, I'm sure you'll find him in one."

He looks and looks and looks, and meanwhile his momma is cutting out ribbons and fancy paper and gluing them to the scrapbook pages. It's almost like a scavenger hunt! Ben's really good at those.

"Aha! Momma, I found him!" He holds up the photo triumphantly. His momma leans in for a closer look, setting her scissors down.

"Mmmm, yup, that's your grandpa. Good job, Ben!"

She ruffles his hair and goes back to her clipping while Ben sits with a warm pride burning in his chest. It wasn't even that hard to find a picture of Grandpa Smith, really.

Unlike all the other people in the pictures, Grandpa Smith looked just the same as always no matter how far back the picture was taken.

-

It starts when Ben is about five years old, climbing over the monkey bars at the park because his arms aren't quite strong enough yet to allow him to swing from them. He's at the park with his grandfather instead of his momma for once; they spent the better part of an hour playing on the jungle gym, pretending to be knights and dragons and wizards and monsters. It was really fun!

Grandpa Smith said he was all tuckered out for now and needed to catch his breath before they could play again, so Ben was having fun without him for now. He tries balancing on top of the monkey bars with his hands and knees, wondering if he could stand on them. Maybe. He's seen other kids do it before.

"Enjoying the view up there, Ben?" His grandfather calls.

Ben nods. "Yeah, Grandpa, I can see most of the block from up he—"

Ben slips.

He doesn't have far to fall, but he's still just a little kid, and even small distances can leave big bumps and bruises. He falls, and he lands, and he hurts, and he cries out. Grandpa Smith is already running.

When his grandfather reaches him, he addresses the situation with a very slightly alarmed, "Hey kiddo, what seems to be the problem?"

Ben points to his knee, sniffling. It's not that bad all things considered; the jungle gym area in the park was lined with soft sand to cushion any children that might fall while playing. But Ben doesn't know that. All he knows is that he fell, and his knee hurts, and it's all red and scrape-y, and that's bad.

His grandfather assesses the damage with a trained eye. He brushes some of the sand on Ben's knee away gently. "Hmmm. Yep, that's a certified boo-boo alright. Lemme see what I got."

Grandpa Smith pulls out the bag that Ben's momma had sent them to the park with, full of snacks and band-aids and antiseptics and a few sandwiches wrapped up in plastic in case they got hungry. He rummages through everything in the bag and pulls out a heavy looking forge hammer. Ben looks at it in astonishment. How did that fit in there...?

"This hammer," his grandfather says, Ben hanging on his every word, "Is a magic hammer. It helps me fix all kinds of things. And I bet you that it can fix booboos just as well as it can fix bent plating. Do you wanna give it a try?"

"Mhmm," Ben says, more sniffles breaking through.

His grandfather spins the hammer around in his hand with a fancy flourish, and then gently—ever so gently—taps it against Ben's knee. "Boop."

Ben giggles at the silliness of it. His grandfather inspects the freshly-booped knee, and deems it acceptable before putting his forge hammer back in the bag and zipping it right up. He helps Ben get up off of the sand, dusting off his grandson's shorts as he does.

"Okay kiddo," Grandpa Smith says, "Now that that's over with, let's go get you some ice cream to help melt the rest of that booboo away. No worries about Sandy getting mad for spoiling your dinner, either. I won't tell your mother if you won't, right?"

Ben nods enthusiastically, tears more than forgotten at the prospect of ice cream before dinner. His grandfather takes him by the hand and leads him away from the park to the ice cream parlor two blocks away.

His knee really does feel better, too. Maybe the hammer really is magic.

-

It starts when Ben is about seven years old, and a schoolyard conversation he'd overheard earlier that day prompts him to ask his parents a question. They're eating dinner together—one of his mom's experiments with tofu again that Ben kind of likes, but it isn't really his favorite. A lot of what his mom makes for dinner isn't really his favorite, especially since the new health food store opened up just down the road, but a few weeks ago they started having pizza once a week on Saturdays as a compromise to all the brussel sprouts and quinoa and fish sauce.

His mom and dad are talking about his dad's coworkers, and takes him about the same time to find a lull in their conversation as it does to work up the nerve to say what he wants to say.

"Hey, Mom, Dad?" he says, putting his fork down for just a minute, "How did you two meet?"

His parents pause almost comically. Ben sees them share a glance, the kind they do when they're wondering whether to tell him about Santa or the Tooth Fairy. His dad is the one to speak first.

"What brought this on, Ben?" the man says.

Ben shrugs noncommittally. "I dunno," he says, because he's seven and caring about this sort of stuff is already very slightly uncool, "It's just that I overheard Cash saying his parents met in a volcano tour in Hawai'i, and I thought... I dunno, I was just wondering."

He sees his mom shrug. "Well," she says, "It's not really as glamorous as meeting on a volcano, but it is a pretty funny story."

"Maybe more funny on your end than on mine," his dad says. His mom smiles and puts a hand on top of her husband's before launching right into the story.

"So, imagine this, you're in town for college and you've never met anyone here before, so you decide to go out to the local coffee shop to see if you can get an idea of what the locals are like. And on the way from your dorm room to the coffee shop, you see a man sitting on the sidewalk in the _goofiest_ outfit you've ever seen."

Ben's dad groans at the memory. Ben himself is already hooked.

"How goofy?" he asks. There is a certifiable twinkle in his mom's eyes.

"Picture this, sweetheart," she says. "He's got a pink overshirt on that he's wearing inside out with the tag sticking out of his collar, he's got a tie-dye shirt that's straight out of the seventies, he's got ripped blue jean shorts on that only go up to here," she shows Ben where on her leg the shorts would've ended and his eyes goggle, "and he's wearing white tube socks going up to his knees with red sneakers that look older than he is."

Ben pictures it. He looks at his dad, incredulous. His dad looks away from him, embarrassed.

"It was laundry day," his dad says, as if that was the only defense he had left.

"So naturally," his mom continues, "I needed to go talk to this guy."

"She walks up to me," his dad says, shaking his head. "And she just goes, 'You having a bad day?' And I just go, 'Lady, you don't even know the half of it.'"

"And bear in mind, I just said goodbye to everybody I knew and was completely alone in this town, so I figured that I had a pretty good idea of what a bad day would be like. So I say: try me."

"And I just start venting everything to her," his dad says. "I tell her that I forgot to do my laundry until there was nothing else left, that my washing machine broke down so I had to go out in the city to look for a laundromat, that my clothes got stolen, that my best friend wasn't answering my messages, that I was having a really hard time this week—"

"And I ask him if there's anything else that he needs to get off his chest because by now I'm feeling pretty sorry for him, and he looks at me, and he goes 'Well, my mom is an alien.'" his mom says, looking her husband right in the eye for emphasis, "And I look right back at him and I say, 'Well, my dad is from another dimension.'"

Ben laughs. Oh man, his parents are dorks. His dad let out a good-humored smile.

"Yeah. That's pretty much how we reacted, too. We just stared at each other for a while and started laughing, and then your mother invited me out for coffee with her," he says.

"And that's it?" Ben asks, still snickering just a little.

"That's it," his mom says, and she goes back to her dinner. "Course, it turned out a few years later that we weren't actually joking, but that's a story for another time."

" _Sandra!_ " his dad exclaims, alarmed.

Ben just laughs some more.

-

It starts when Ben is about eight years old, and he's sitting in the garage trying not to write a report for his English homework in favor of spending time with Grandpa Smith for the weekend before his grandfather has to fly back home. He's not done enjoying his time with Grandpa Smith yet. Grandpa Max lives in town and Ben can see him whenever he wants, but Grandpa Smith only flies down three or four times a year. It's not fair!

Adding homework on top of all that only makes it even more unfair.

"Hey Grandpa," Ben calls, watching his grandfather tinker with the old stereo that his dad broke ages ago and said he'd fix one day but never did.

"Whatcha need, Ben?" his grandfather responds, not even looking up from his repair work. Or at least, he doesn't turn his head in Ben's direction, so Ben figures he doesn't look up. Grandpa Smith always has his hair in his eyes, so it's kinda hard to tell where he's looking sometimes.

"What do you do for a living?" he asks. His grandfather scoffs.

"Uh, I'd think it's pretty clear what I do, kiddo." He does turn his head over to Ben this time, eyes still hidden under the tangly mess of overgrown hair.

"I'm a grandpasmith," he says with the utmost seriousness.

Ben bursts out into laughter. His grandfather, undeterred, continues on.

"Haven't you ever wondered where grandpas come from?" he asks, waving around his screwdriver for effect. "They don't just spring up from out of the ground like daisies, you know! You gotta forge them right, or they end up all wrinkly!"

"But they're always wrinkly!" Ben protests in between wheezes.

"Yeah, because most people get their grandpas from the store! But not me! I make them all nice and professional, without any of that old people smell or wearing socks with sandals."

Ben feels like he's dying. "What about the golf and the hard candy?" he asks, "Do those come from the store too?"

His grandfather shakes his head. "Nah, those are built in. If you try to take the golf out, you destabilize the whatcha-doin-sport-matrix and just end up with one of those grumpy old men that live at the end of the street and tell everybody to stay off their lawns. And nobody wants one of those."

"I'll say! They're always giving you the stink eye when you're waiting for the school bus! And you can't even play ball in your yard or anything in case the ball goes flying over their fence!"

"Ugh, that's the worst," his grandfather agrees. "Say, you wanna come help me fix this thing? I think I can get it to reach broadcasts _in space_."

"Sure!" Ben hops up from where he was sitting and heads over to his grandfather, who's already pointing out the different parts of the stereo and what they do.

This is so much better than doing homework.

-

It starts when Ben is about nine years old, standing in the hallway with whatever question he was going to say dying in his mouth, listening to his mother cry into the phone.

"And he can't come visit?" his mom asks.

Ben doesn't know who she's talking to. He thinks it might be Grandma Zelda, but he's not sure. He's just standing outside of her door, gripping the molding on the door frame and very much wanting to go inside and give his mom a hug. He's not going to do that though. This doesn't sound like a conversation his mom would be fine with him interrupting.

That doesn't mean he has to like it, though.

"There's a war—Mom, there's always a war!" his mom says, angrily. "That's where the name comes from! Every time we went there, there was always some trouble brewing that needed his help, and every time there was always time for him to come visit! Why is now different?!"

His hands clench into fists. So that is Grandma Zelda. Was this about Grandpa Smith then? What was happening? What war?

Would he ever see his grandfather again?

The line on his mom's end is silent for a long while. He can hear her sniffling.

"Okay," she says eventually. "Okay, I will. Just—just tell him we love him, okay? Tell him to be careful, and take care of himself. We'll be thinking about him." Silence. "Okay. I'll go tell Ben. I love you, Mom."

Ben hears the sound of the phone reconnect with the receiver and rushes into the room to give his mom a hug.

She doesn't ask what he was doing so close to the door. It's possible that she doesn't even realize he overheard most of the conversation. She just cries, and cries, and holds her son tight.

"Is something wrong with Grandpa?" Ben asks, dreading the answer.

"Grandpa..." His mom starts out. She stutters. She grips him tighter.

"Grandpa won't be able to see us again for a few years, honey."

-

It starts when Ben is about ten years old, and for the first time he spends his birthday only ever seeing one of his grandfathers.

Grandpa Max will be the only one he ends up seeing for a long time.

-

It starts when Ben is about sixteen years old, combing through the plumber archives after school because he doesn't have practice or homework or new video games and he's looking for something to do. It's a really impressive level of boredom that you have to reach in order for helping people out with their database systems to seem like a perfectly reasonable way to pass the time. It helps that the databases are at least cool enough to be filled with aliens.

He keeps blowing his hair out of his eyes as he moves the files around. It's been a long time since he's had a proper haircut and the length is really starting to bug him.

Kevin walks up next to him and drops a cardboard box filled to the brink with files onto the table, letting out a resounding _whoomp_. "That's the last of the hard copies," he says, clapping his hands free of any dust. "Can't believe these guys have supercomputers and they're still using paper files for all the important stuff. What is this, the seventies?"

Ben shrugs. "They're supposed to be emergency backups. You don't need power to look at a piece of paper, and they can't be hacked either."

"Yeah," Kevin agrees reluctantly, "But it's a lot harder to lose track of a cloud file than it is to lose a sheet of paper."

Ben can't really argue with him there. The two teenagers just start looking through the files, occasionally showing each other the more interesting ones.

"Look at this one: living asteroid arrested for public indecency regarding the planet Neptune. Who was even keeping watch on Neptune when that happened?"

"I dunno. We keep finding guys for Neptune and Saturn, but no one does anything interesting on Uranus. It's all just tax shelters and insider trading there."

Ben shrugs. He tosses that file into the steadily growing pile of minor infractions and picks up another out of the cardboard box. The file is noticeably thicker than the others. "Whoa, this one's big. This guy must have a pretty big rap sheet."

Kevin glances over from his own file, something on a smuggler from Khoros. "Eh. Pretty sure mine's bigger."

Ben ignores that. He flips it open. He whistles.

"Whoever this guy is, he's got a pretty long history. 'First recorded sighting on Earth: 1818, attempting to buy aniline dye with solid gold coins. Subject insisted the currency was valid, but later examination showed them not to be of any human-make.'"

"What, we got a time traveler?" Kevin asked. "Or is he some guy from Ledgerdomain or wherever?"

"Seems like it," Ben said, flipping a few pages forward. "There's no name here anywhere. The different entries just say 'Subject' and list a code names the Plumbers used to use for him. Listen to this one. 'Fifth recorded sighting on Peptos IV: 1943, subject reportedly—" he starts cracking up— "Subject reportedly turned a building into a giant fish, after mishearing a local's desire to eat it. When informed that gourmands do not eat organic matter, subject turned the fish into one made of stone."

Ben sets the file aside for a second so he can catch his breath, while Kevin has a blank look on his face like he's still trying to wrap his head around the processes involved. "...Was it a live fish?" he asks.

"I don't know," Ben says. He flips through a few more pages. "Hey, this one has a picture. Eighteenth recorded sighting on Earth: 1960, Subject found walking through Plumber base despite—"

He freezes. The person in the picture looks familiar.

No. They look unmistakable. He hasn't seen them in years, but they've never once changed in all the time Ben has been alive. Green overcoat, black boots, messy brown hair covering the eyes. They even have the hammer, hanging off from a white belt.

"Huh," Kevin says, leaning over to look at the photograph, "That guy looks like you."

Ben wants to shake his head. Wants to refute it. Wants to forget he even saw it and just go back to the him that he was a few minutes ago before he ever even picked up this file.

But all he can do is look at the photograph, with his messy brown hair hanging over his eyes and his green jacket zipped up all the way for once, and say "No, I look like _him_."

-

It starts when Ben is about sixteen years old, coming home from foiling a robbery with Rook to find his mom talking animatedly on the couch with someone he hasn't seen in years. Ben was drinking a smoothie when he walked in. It falls out of his hand and spills all over the floor.

"Ben!" his mom says.

"Ben!" Grandpa Smith says, a lot less irritably. "Look at how much you've grown! You're like a giant compared to when I last saw you!"

Ben doesn't really know what to say. So he doesn't really say anything. Grandpa Smith looks exactly the same as he did the last time Ben saw him, and all the times before that. How had he never noticed?

His grandfather, meanwhile, has heaps to say. "Guess who finally managed to finish up that business back home that was keeping me away all this time? Not me, but I helped, so it still counts! And just in time for your birthday too, how great is that?"

Ben looks over to his mom. He still hasn't told her about the file he found, about the picture he saw, about the suspicions he had. How exactly do you tell someone that their father is—what, a time traveler? A dimensional traveler? Some combination of the two?

Maybe if he were younger and had a lot less tact, he would've brought it up sooner, but all Ben can think about is that his mom hasn't seen her father for just as long as he hasn't seen his grandfather, and Ben is not going to ruin that for her.

"Yeah," he says eventually. "It is great. We've got a lot of catching up to do."

Grandpa Smith waves him off with a smile. "Not as much as you'd think. Sandy's been telling me all about your adventures. You've saved the world a few times since getting that watch of yours, right? You're a regular Hero!"

It's weird. On the one hand, yes, Ben is a hero. He has no issues with being called a hero. He has so little issue with being called a hero that that's what he's been calling his own transformations ever since the day he turned ten years old. It's casual. It's familiar. It's a nice little ego boost.

On the other hand, this is the grandfather that Ben thought was completely normal for sixteen years until finding out otherwise from a photo in the plumber database marking him as an unknown agent they've been trying to catch for two hundred years. This is the grandfather that Ben hasn't seen since before he even got the omnitrix, and Ben still doesn't even know what kept the man away for six years. And he's talking like nothing has ever changed at all. Like six years is just the blink of an eye to him.

His feet are moving before he can even fully process where they're moving him to.

He hears his mother call out to him, "Ben, where are you going?!"

He hears himself respond to her, "I'm going out."

He shuts the door.

He leaves.

-

It starts when Ben is about sixteen years old, flying home as Ghostfreak in the dead of night because by the time his senses came back to him and he realized what a scene he'd made, it was already way too late to come back at a reasonable hour. So he just stayed out a little bit later until he was sure that his parents would be asleep by the time he got back. His mom would tell his dad what happened. His dad would be concerned. He knew he'd have to face them and explain himself eventually, but he'd really prefer to do it in the morning when they'd all had time to sleep on things.

The porch lights are still on despite the late hour. He can see Grandpa Smith standing out front, looking into the street with some unreadable expression.

Well. No avoiding a confrontation now, he guesses. He flies over to his house and shifts out of translucency. Grandpa Smith looks at Ghostfreak materializing out of thin air in front of him like it's nothing he hasn't seen before.

"Heya, Ben," he says.

"Hey, Grandpa Smith," Ben rasps. The timer on the omnitrix runs out. He returned to himself in a flash of red light. "Sorry about earlier today. You okay?"

There's a tired smile on his grandfather's face.

"Man," he says, the ghost of a laugh coloring his voice, "I almost forgot about Grandpa Smith. You didn't know how to say 'Cysero' when you were really little, so we just went with the last name. Do you remember that?"

Ben does not remember that. But it sounds like something he would have trouble with as a little kid.

He hasn't missed that his grandfather dodged the question, either.

"I don't blame you for being upset, or whatever. I didn't want to stay away," the man continues. "You guys are my favorite things about this dimension. Only reason I didn't visit more often even when I could was because they wouldn't let me."

"So you are from Ledgerdomain," Ben says, not at all feeling great about that particular theory being confirmed. "There was a lot of speculation in your file."

He doesn't specify which file. He doesn't need to. He still remembers the picture of his grandfather strolling through a Plumber base like it wasn't a more secure location than the Pentagon could ever dream of.

Grandpa Smith shakes his head. "Nah, not Ledgerdomain. I've _been_ there, but I'm not _from_ there. The magic works too differently. I'm from a place called Lore."

"What, and they didn't like you coming to Earth all the time?" Ben asks, maybe a bit more angrily than he'd like. "Not even to see your family? Not even to let them know you were still alive?"

"No, they didn't try to stop me. If I wanted to leave, I'm pretty sure there's not a soul alive who even _could_ stop me. It's just..."

His grandfather sighs. "Well, you're a Hero. You know what it's like."

Ben feels all of his anger melt away.

"You..."

"There was a war. There's usually always a war going on somewhere, that's actually how Lore got its name, but this was a big one. A giant dragon ended up eating the sun before it was over. It was crazy. And as much as I wanted to leave, there was always something that needed to be done, some army to fight and some experiment to run and some weapon to make and some Hero to help, and when you're the only person in the world who can do what you do, you can't really just stop and let someone else handle it for a while, you know?"

Yeah.

"Yeah," Ben says. He leans against the porch railing, letting the memories wash over him. "Yeah, I know. I've—kinda been dealing with that ever since I got the omnitrix."

"I'm sorry about that, by the way."

"Don't be. You couldn't have known I would get it."

"No, but I helped _build_ it. I've been coming to this dimension for centuries, you think I wouldn't have found Azmuth by now?"

"Seriously?" Ben says, laughing before he can even figure out why. "Oh man. You must've driven him crazy. Did you use the magic hammer on him?"

"You know I did," Grandpa Smith laughs back. "Every time something blew up, I'd hammer it back together. And then sometimes it'd blow up all over again!"

And then they're just... cracking up on the porch. Like nothing really happened. Like they never really separated. At some point Grandpa Smith asks Ben about his adventures. At some point Ben asks Grandpa Smith about his. They just keep talking and talking and talking, until the sky turns from night black to sunrise pink.

Ben stares at the morning sun.

"We should probably go back inside at some point," he says.

"Yeah," his grandfather agrees. "Carl and Sandy both really want to talk to you. Not so much in the mad way, they were just concerned, mostly. Wanted to make sure you were doing alright."

Ben lets out a breath. It's easily visible in the cold morning air. Honestly, the fact that they weren't freezing all night is kind of a minor miracle. "I think I am," he says.

His grandfather nods. "Oh," he says, "Before I forget." He twirls his hand around in a casual flourish, and suddenly he's holding a cupcake on a tiny saucer. There's a lit candle on top that's burning with a green flame.

"Happy birthday, Ben," Grandpa Smith says, handing the cupcake over to him.

Ben takes it with a smile. "Thanks, Grandpa."

He blows out the candle.

They go through the door together.

-

It ends when Ben is about seventeen years old, and his grandfather tells him all about Lore.


End file.
